Product Description

Roads & Boats is a long, strategic game in which each player builds up a civilization. From humble beginnings (a woodcutter, a stonemason) their economies expand to include trucks, steamships, and even a stock exchange. The emphasis is on transportation, with each player trying to outcompete others in building roads, constructing factories, breeding geese and donkeys, inventing gold mines etcetera. but beware! there is no concept of territory in the game, so anything you build can be used by any other player! The third edition of Roads & Boats contains wooden transporters in the shape of donkeys, wagons, trucks, rafts, rowing-boats and steamers.

Product Reviews

Yes, this is a pricey game, probably $20-$30 overpriced, but Splotter Spellen is a small company, and doesn't produce games in volume. Roads & Boats has 200+ wooden bits, and several hundred lesser quality bits. Hex tiles alone number about 140 to construct game boards. No, it doesn't have $100 worth of bits, but I, for one, am glad I made the investment. This one is a keeper.

Each player starts with three donkeys, five piles of lumber, one pile of stone, and two geese with which to build a transportantion and production empire. Final scoring is based upon the number of stock certificates, coins, and gold nuggets that the players accumulate, as well contributing to the building of the Wonder.

Roads and Boats is not normally a game of great conflict. The game consists mostly of each player building their own empire. However, a board can be constructed to allow for lots of conflict if you prefer, or some lesser amount of conflict. There is room for conflict, if your game group prefers that sort of thing. With little conflict you are looking at a 4+ hour game, add conflict and you could be at it all day.

The game is pure strategy, no luck involved, thank you. With all the bits, the strategy, and planning required, this is a rather fiddly game, but the payoff is huge if you don't mind keeping track of units. Win, lose, or call it quits because of time restraints, I find it to be a satisfying and fun game.

Roads & Boats is perfectly suited for solitaire play. An included scenario book lays out solitaire games and high scores. The Splotter Spellen website gives more scenario maps and the best scores for each. This enables you to play solitaire and know how well you did compared to others. I can't remember ever playing any boardgame alone and liking it, but Roads and Boats has me hooked. It holds my attention as well as Civilization on the PC, and I love Civ.

If you like long, empire building games with lots of pieces such as the original Avalon Hill 'Civilization' (R&B has hundreds more pieces, yet doesn't take as long to play), or 'Sid Meier's Civilization' on the PC Roads & Boats should appeal to you.

Two huge thumbs up.

Ben Baldanza

April 30, 2000

Wow. Roads and Boats, the second major release from Splotter (along with Bus) represents a Herculean effort in game design. Or, it might be better said in game system design, since the endlessly variable scenario options and wide variety of strategic options make this a game that must be played multiple times and with various approaches before you start to appreciate its depth and sophistication. Said another way, Roads and Boats is not for everyone but those who enjoy a logistical transport and development challenge will find a lot to explore in the box.

The game surface is developed from a series of hex tiles that represent
five types of land and one with just water (sea), with some of the lands
having rivers. The scenarios included with the game show sample setups
for one through five players. The landscape chosen determines how much
can be produced over time and how confrontational versus cooperative the
game play will be. Since this probably makes no sense yet, let me explain
what you do and how you score.

You score for the wealth you control at the games' end in the form of gold
nuggets, coins, and stock bonds. The game pace is determined by building
a common temple, called the 'Wonder', at the end of each round. In addition
to the wealth scoring, each row of the Wonder scores points allocated among
the players who helped construct that level. To control the wealth, however,
means that you must be carrying it on one of six available 'transporters',
three for land and three for water. This brings up one of the main features
of this game: you develop the land and spend resources to do so, but you
only control what you carry. The buildings, factories, and other producers
that are developed are common property, and only those who supply the inputs
(if needed) or get there first to take the production can use it. In addition,
each land tile can only hold one building so judicious use of the limited
resources and building an efficient transport network that can both move
goods where needed and hold goods for protection is what this is all about.

Each player begins by choosing a starting hex and gets allocated a basic
set of resources: three donkeys (the most basic land transport), five sets
of boards, one pile of stones, and two geese. From these humble beginnings,
players can build 16 types of buildings or structures, and in turn these
can produce eight types of goods along with five transporters (which, when
combined with the donkeys, create six.) Along with this, both the donkeys
and the geese reproduce if given the right setting, roads and bridges are
built to connect the tiles, and walls are created to protect the most desired
land or structure from opponents' use.

The best way to describe the variety of development is to walk through
the four steps in each round. First, production occurs. Livestock left
in pairs on otherwise empty pasture produce an offspring, and each building
has the opportunity to produce. Five primary buildings produce automatically
each production round, even when no transporter is near and no inputs are
added. The eleven secondary buildings produce only if given the proper
inputs locally, and each are limited in the total production per round.
For example, a Sawmill will produce two sets of boards if fed a single
set of tree trunks. This can be done up to six times per turn by the same
or multiple players. A Truck Factory will produce a truck if given iron
and fuel, but only can be used once per round. The first player to use
it gets the truck, and everyone else must wait until the next round or
build a factory closer to his or her strength.

Multi-level production is necessary to win, since only gold is produced
from an initial building. To turn the gold into coins, you must first
build a Mint, and then feed it with fuel and gold. To get a Stock Bond,
you build a Stock Exchange and then give it coins and paper. But, to get
the paper requires a Paper Mill and, well, you get the idea. In order
to produce anything requiring inputs, you must get the appropriate goods
to the tile and risk leaving them there while you go back to get the rest
(because if someone else gets there first, they can use them,) or bring
everything in on your transporters.

After production, the movement phase begins. Each transporter can move
a specific distance, with the Donkey being the only land transporter that
can move on unpaved land (no road.) Donkeys move slowly and can't carry
much, so developing a wagon or truck speeds your delivery and increases
your lift capacity but each take time and available resources. In the
water, you can start with a raft and upgrade to a rowboat or a steamship
with the same consequences. No one player is allowed to build more than
eight total transporters or more than five in any one mode (land or water).

Following movement, players build. You are only allowed to build on tiles
where you have a transporter, and as said before only one building per
hex. Once built, a structure cannot be removed. All buildings are built
using only combinations of boards and bricks, making a good supply of each
essential. Only Oil-Rigs are built at sea, though many buildings require
a specific land type for construction. For example, a Quarry (that produces
stones) can be built only on rocks. Certain sophisticated buildings, including
water transporter factories, require first that 'research' be completed
to gain the construction knowledge. Research is produced with geese and
paper (the geese for the quills or the food while studying, we can't decide
which,) making it necessary to breed geese and get access to a paper mill.

As the final phase, each player contributes to the building of the Wonder,
and every round a neutral brick is added independent of the number of levels
constructed by the players. Thus, the game will eventually end even if
no one builds the Wonder, although this wouldn't happen since controlling
the pace can be used to advantage plus the scoring benefit is meaningful.

The limited resources and production abilities create a natural tension
for sequencing. There is always more you want to do but are just short
of resources or movement. During each round, play is typically simultaneous
although at times there may be conflict as to who gets to use the factory
or take the resource sitting on the tile. This is handled in an odd but
effective way; before each phase the players can request a change to the
play sequence. The game starts by placing a praying figure for each player
in front of the temple, and typically the player furthest from the temple
moves first. If a change request is made, the player farthest picks the
spot they want, followed in order from there. Each player can then "invoke
the favor of the gods" to protest the new sequence in reverse order. This
exercise adds time to the game and feels like it could be simpler, but
it no doubt is effective. At the game end, the tiebreaker is won the person
closest to the temple, but that does not typically outweigh being first
to act if possible.

Within this vast array of opportunities, natural strategies develop to
use the surrounding resources efficiently and gain access to the buildings
needed through construction or transport. The land scenario helps determine
how conflictive the game will be, since if each player has a reasonable
amount of land to develop independently then the need to branch out to
use producers built by other players is limited until later in the game.
Water forms a natural boundary only until the first raft is built, at
which point interaction, desired or not, starts to happen between the lands
on each side of the sea. There is of course an optimum score that can
be obtained with each scenario, and the one-player version of the game
is really a puzzle aimed at getting the most out of the limited resource.
Carefully tracking others' building is necessary in order not to duplicate
efforts when you can plan for their use.

The open access of resources is something that feels strange, as it is
not common in most games. You take time and resources to develop a specific
factory or building and it is natural to want its production for yourself.
Doing this, though, requires strategic placement and/or building defensive
walls, each of which create a corresponding constraint on other activities.
There are few games that replicate the delicate balance or opportunity
cost of action better than this, and you will find yourself second-guessing
previous actions and regretting wasting resource on that Clay Pit, or other
similar frustrations.

The game pace is slow at first, but quickens as the networks develop and
the development becomes clearer. One minor annoyance is that with your
initial resources you must build a Woodcutter and a Sawmill, so in a game
where everyone will develop individually at first it makes sense to just
start with one of each and fewer raw resources. The timing of the game
and the methodic logistics will turn off players who crave more action,
but careful planning and networking will reward the player with abundant
production and dominance over time. The 'open resources' feature is common
to other games by Splotter, notably Bus (also reviewed in this issue).
In that game, players construct buildings and lure passengers to the city
though all players can use each.

The production of this game is well done. The game includes hundreds of
good-quality counters, lots of wooden bits, and a nice plastic case to
hold most of the pieces. The land and sea hex tiles are thinner than ideal,
but with care they should last. The game is played by placing a Plexiglas
sheet over the hexes so that roads can be drawn, and this has the added
effect of protecting the paper hexes from spills or tears. For anyone
who doesn't enjoy the game play, they can consider Roads and Boats as a
'Binary Arts' type puzzle with the goal being to get all of the pieces
to fit in the box and have the lid fully close. This thing is packed!

Roads and Boats is like Ravel's Bolero compared with most games' 1812 Overture; it is the patient building and slow development that leads to the rousing finale. With Gerard Mulder's excellent games, Cwali's intriguing offers, and Splotter producing real substantive efforts, the Netherlands is now
bringing the world game development to rival the best of Germany. Perfect
time for Knizia to create the 'Merchants of Amsterdam'!